Today's Opinions

A little more than a week ago, I had the chance to break out on a long weekend and bounce up and down the East Coast on a four-day trip that took me to two of the biggest cities in the U.S.: New York City and Clemson, S.C., on a football weekend.

A couple years ago, I lived out a childhood dream of going to New York to catch David Letterman’s show before he finally closed up shop and grew a giant, white beard.

On this trip, I was again reliving my youth by going to see guitar legend Eric Clapton at Madison Square Garden.

"Please don’t put me in a nursing home” is a sentiment I hear often from my senior clients. Many people seem to equate nursing homes with captivity and the end of all freedom. Realistically, though, as we live longer than our predecessors, often with various disabilities and debilitating health problems, nursing homes will eventually become the only option for many of us.

Although my late mother never finished high school, she still was a wise person. One of her favorite sayings was, there are two sides to every story. Of course when I tried to use this logic after I disobeyed one of her rules, she would reply, “There are exceptions!”

Since our son’s death of a drug overdose almost five years ago Oct. 10, 2012, an additional 200,000 men and women have died as a result of the same disease, an addiction to drugs and alcohol. At the time of Patrick’s passing, the tsunami of death because of addiction was just reaching shore. Many were already dead or dying, but the worst was yet to come.

As some readers may know already, the Beacon isn’t printed here in Shallotte. Since our press shut down in 2011, the fine folks at The News & Record in Greensboro have been helping us bring our print edition to readers each week via the U.S. Postal Service and more than 50 racks we have in and around Brunswick County.

By the end of this month, Greensboro’s press will have shut down as well, shifting its duties — including the printing of the Beacon — to its neighboring newspaper’s press at The Winston-Salem Journal.

Tethering, called by another word, is torture. The act of having a rope, a chain or another object tightly wound around the neck of an animal day after day, year after year, never getting a break from this existence … you certainly can’t refer to this as a life because it is not.

If you cannot treat an animal humanely, then you should not be able to have one at all. If we decide to own a dog, then we have the responsibility to treat them with love and tenderness as we would treat any member of our family.

As a resident of Sunset Beach, my husband and I were delighted the town built Sunset Beach Town Park in such a beautiful area.

Since its opening, we have enjoyed the various festivities and events that are held in the park and have often said, “What a smart move on the town’s part!” One of these events, the waterfront market, has been a favorite. The park and the market give us a sense of community, a “town center.”